The call to laymanship

God calls men to be ministers—yes, but just as truly God calls men and women to Christian laymanship. Statistics of church membership notoriously misrepresent the church’s real spiritual power. About half the population of the United States are Christian lay folk, but that is counting noses, not gauging spiritual strength.

Millions of Christian lay folk have only this much relation- ship with God—they believe that there is a God, and once in a while they turn to him for help. That is about the sum of it. But turn now to the Bible and from one end to the other one finds another kind of experience altogether—men confronting God, running headlong into him, stopped in their tracks with a call, a commission, a sense of vocation from which in vain they try to flee.

From Moses at the burning bush, taking the shoes from off his feet because the place whereon he stands is holy ground and receiving a commission he cannot escape, 456 or Isaiah in the Temple, hearing a voice divine that he cannot refuse: “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” and answering, “Here am I, send me”; to Peter, James, and John, summoned by Christ to follow him, or Paul stopped dead on the Damascus Road with a challenge that transforms his life—such experience, the divine-human encounter from which one goes out under orders with a great vocation, is the very heart of the Bible’s religion.

Each of these typical men I have just named was a layman. None was a priest, an official ecclesiastic.